1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a technology for recognizing a person by using biological information, such as pulse rate, fingerprints, iris pattern, of that person.
2. Description of the Related Art
The technology for recognizing a person (or other living beings) by using biological information of that person has been attracting attention. The biological information includes, for example, pulse rate, fingerprints, iris pattern. Biometric devices are used to acquire the biological information of persons.
One approach in recognizing a person by using biological information of that person is to acquire his biological information and check if biological information that matches with the acquired biological information exists in a database prepared beforehand. However, this approach is time-consuming if the database contains a large volume of data.
Another approach is to allocate identification numbers (IDs) to persons and store IDs and biological information of persons in a correlated manner in a database. When a person provides his ID and biological information, biological information corresponding to the provided ID is retrieved from the database, and it is checked if the provided biological information matches with the retrieved biological information retrieved. If the two match, that person is recognized as an authorized person. The trouble of manually inputting the ID can be eliminated by storing an ID in a wireless IC tag (RFID) are reading the ID from the IC tag. Such a technology has been disclosed in Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. 2005-148982.